Tag: dis

"I'm so tired of all the bad news on birdsite.""Yeah, there's just too much about The Cheeto."Cheeto and birdsite might not be common vocabulary, but the phrases are strangely interpretable. It's easy to jump from Cheeto to Donald Trump or from birdsite to Twitter. Even more understandable is the attitude that comes along for the ride: Somehow it's clear that someone who uses ornate synonyms isn't happy about either entity.But how is it that we're so quick to figure out the hidden meanings of these words? And what does it mean for communication in the internet age that we're increasingly drawn to elaborate synonyms?Gretchen McCulloch is WIRED's Resident Linguist. She's the cocreator of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics, and her book Because Internet: Understa...

Social media “influencers” have a hard life. Mostly it seems to consist of taking pictures of themselves. Or things. Of course, sometimes even taking pictures of things proves too difficult, and in those desperate hours, there’s only one logical solution — steal someone else’s.
Which brings us to the tale of Sadelle Yeung, described by Apple Daily as a KOL — that’s “key opinion leader” for the non-acronym savvy — who this week hurriedly removed 95 images from her account. Among the deleted photos were pictures of avocado toast, brick walls, blues skies and sunflowers. Naturally, many were accompanied by faux inspirational captions. Y’know, influencer stuff.
The model — who has 91,000 followers on Instagram — regularly posts about travel, and last year even appeared in a